A Free Press Was Working Only In Iraq

CARPENTER

January 18, 1991|by PAUL CARPENTER, The Morning Call

By an odd coincidence, the Cryptoquote puzzle on yesterday's comics page was based on a passage written by Ernie Pyle.

The Cryptoquote is one of my favorite parts of the paper and Pyle is one of my heroes. He was the most revered war correspondent of all until the Battle of Okinawa, when a Nambu machine-gun bullet hit his left temple.

"On this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945," says a marker about 200 yards from the snow-white beach of Ie Shima, a tiny island just off Okinawa's Motobu peninsula.

I had been thinking about Pyle since Wednesday morning, when I went to Muhlenberg College's Learn-In. One session was called `Media and the Middle East Crisis," conducted by journalism teachers Julian Halliday and James Schneider.

"There is no major news media organization that can operate without access to government sources," Schneider said. "There are all sorts of ways the government can work to control the news."

He and Halliday noted that the government has gone far beyond controlling access to sources in the coverage of the crisis, imposing restrictions unheard of in a free society. "The people they're trying to keep things from are not the enemy. It's the people back here," said Halliday.

A crowd of about 300 people, mostly students, attended the session. The only strident voice was from a middle-aged Whitehall man who rose to attack The Morning Call for refusing to publish his cockamamie printed attack on Jews, and then screeched at others who suggested he was a little on the anti-Jewish side.

Otherwise, the people at the session were a serious and thoughtful bunch, although they didn't know ac- tual warfare was only hours away. When some of them learned I was a reporter, they asked about my views.

I said the military's concern is not about security, logistics, morale or reporters' safety. The concern is about truth. Vietnam is still fresh in many military minds, and much difficulty there was caused by the simple fact that the public learned the truth about casualties, deceit, My Lai, the degenerate Saigon regime and so on.

I was in an Air Force public relations office at the time -- at a base just miles from where Ernie Pyle had died -- and I learned a lot about the restriction of inconvenient truths.

The public eventually heard the truth about Vietnam from reporters like Peter Arnett, an old acquaintance who now works for CNN and was one of those reporters in a Baghdad hotel who told a spellbound world about the start of the gulf war.

It is mortifying that Arnett and his colleagues worked many hours without censorship or fetters in Iraq, while reporters under U.S. military purview were totally restrained.

If the military controls what the public hears, the public will soon realize it's hearing lies. If the military is wise, and if its cause and conduct are just, it will recognize that a free press works in its favor.

Consider this passage, one of the last Ernie Pyle wrote at Okinawa:

"An order eventually went out against wearing (Japanese) clothing. ... But before the order came, some Marines had dug up lots of Japanese kimonos out of the smashed houses and put them on while washing their single set of clothes. It was a funny sight -- those few dozen dirty and unshaved Marines walking around in women's pink and blue kimonos."

It's not a momentous passage, but it rings of truth. Pyle also wrote about horror, gallantry, stupidity, brilliance, waste and compassion -- all the facets of war -- and both the soldiers and the public believed him and thus came to understand.

There will be no Ernie Pyles in the Persian Gulf.

Right now, the military is justly proud of its air war performance. I hope history does not repeat itself in one respect. The Japanese military was once proud of its air war performance in Hawaii. They also didn't have to worry about any Ernie Pyles.

Without the truth, however, the euphoria was hollow, and by the time Pyle died at Okinawa, the Japanese had other things to worry about.